On May 29 1986, a storm tracked across central Macedonia. In the hills north of the small market town of Langadhas, a violent fall of hail flattened ripening cereal crops, but the destruction was very patchy: some fields belonging to the village of Assiros were devastated, but others were unharmed and the storm spared a neighbouring village before causing renewed damage further along its path. Farmers hit by the storm were lucky – they received compensation for their losses from the European Economic Community – but their neighbours were less fortunate. Across the whole region, the winter of 1985/6 had been virtually rainless and some farmers unaffected by the storm barely recouped their sowing costs.

The game of camping or camp-ball, best described as a blend of football and handball, was played for centuries in the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex. It survived well into the nineteenth century, and indeed was consciously revived after the Napoleonic Wars. Furthermore, as a traditional form of recreation, it began to attract antiquarian interest at an early date, and was mentioned by several county and parochial historians of the eighteenth century Our evidence for the game is still regrettably scattered and circumstantial, but its quantity has increased appreciably in recent years. This, therefore, seems a good time to offer some new ideas on the subject, in the hope of getting closer to the real nature and social significance of a once popular regional sport.

The welfare state emerged in 1948 when the National Assistance Act finally abolished the New Poor Law Forty-two years later, as politicians and bureaucrats struggle to keep increasing expenditure within bounds, the existence of the welfare state in its present form is under threat. Just over 150 years ago, the Old Poor Law was presenting parish ratepayers with a similar problem of rising costs, leading in 1834 to a fundamental reorganisation into the New Poor Law It may therefore be profitable to see how effective in practice the New Poor Law was when it replaced a system widely regarded as profligate, and to consider the extent to which benefits payable through the welfare state were available a hundred years or more ago.

This study examines in detail how the New Poor Law, and other forms of relief, affected the whole population of the rural parish of Colyton, in south Devonshire, during the thirty years from 1851 to 1881. It will first describe the sources from which a poor person in Colyton in the mid nineteenth century could look for relief; next discuss how widespread poverty was and who the poor were; then look at what kinds of relief were available, under what conditions; and finally assess the comparative importance to the poor of the different agencies providing assistance.

More bad history has been written about sex than any other subject. Our ignorance about the sexual attitudes and behaviour of people in the past is compounded by a desire to rush to rash generalisation. This is unfortunate, for (consciously or not) our perceptions of the present are shaped by our assumptions about the past. Britain's current preoccupation with ‘Victorian values’ is but a politically visible example of a more general phenomenon. And, more specifically, we do not know a great deal about lower-class sexuality in nineteenth-century England. There are studies of bourgeois desires and sensibilities, but little on the mores of the vast bulk of the population.

As Jean Robin has demonstrated recently, one of the most fruitful approaches to the subject is the detailed local study – the micro-study. It may not appeal to those with a penchant for the broad sweep, but such an approach can provide a useful entry into the sexual habits of the people of the past. This article is intended as a follow-up to Robin's work. It deals with a part of rural Kent and, like Robin's work, it covers an aspect of nineteenth-century sexuality – in this case, the social context of illegitimacy. More particularly, this study (and here I differ from Robin) will question the usefulness of the concept of a ‘bastardy-prone sub-society’ (more of which later), a term still favoured by many historical sociologists. The experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.

A landscape is never so valuable as when it is under threat, and the English rural countryside has been the subject of alarm for centuries. Raymond Williams identified an ‘escalator’ on which literary representation continually looked back upon a past golden age of rural virtue, ensuring that the idea of a ‘true’ rural England has persisted into the twentieth century with extraordinary power Thus Howard Newby can write of the ‘stereotypes and myths which surround the popular image of the rural world’, while, at the same time, he claims this fallacious perception is ‘one of the major protecting illusions of our time’. This illusion has been reinforced by the nature of English society. Sir Lewis Narnier believed English society to be ‘amphibious’ in the eighteenth century, with no sharp divide between town and country among the interests of the ruling classes. By the end of the nineteenth century the countryside, under the influence of Romanticism and a changing class structure, had become the preserve of an upper-class society increasingly separated from industrialism and the great towns. Yet this upper class was cemented by the public schools and the universities to include not only landowners, but an array of occupations, including many intellectuals. Until the First World War, despite increasing mechanisation and specialisation in the countryside, the land presented a rural face largely unspoiled by the intrusion of industrial and urban uses. Land was held in large estates, farmed by tenants in a world of mostly irregular fields, lanes and hedgerows, with buildings that preserved vernacular styles.

United Kingdom (UK) accession into the European Economic Community (EEC), which became a political likelihood in 1970 and an actuality in 1973, led to a major change in agricultural policy away from a deficiency payments system supporting farmers' incomes towards the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) method of assistance through farm prices above the market level. Such a basic alteration in government activity not only imposed well-known and thoroughly researched costs on the British economy in the form of higher food prices and an additional burden of protection, it also undermined dominant post-1945 historical trends.

Firstly, it reversed a thirty year old process towards greater British self-sufficiency Between 1938 and 1946 UK agricultural production rose in value from 42% to 52% of the country's food imports, while under the deficiency payments scheme, permanently established in peacetime by the 1947 Agriculture Act, the proportion of UK food consumption supplied by domestic producers grew steadily until it reached a level of just under 72% in 1972. EEC membership, involving compulsory adoption of the CAP, initially reversed this movement; British agricultural self-sufficiency fell to 66% in 1977, the year when the Common External Tariff (CET) was first applied in full. The higher import bill that inevitably resulted imposed a severe strain on the UK balance of payments, estimated by the pro-market. Heath government in 1970 at a net annual deterioration in the range of 18% to 26%.

As part of research into the local history value of Rural Community Council (RCC) documentation, I would be interested to hear from anyone who holds archive material relating to the activities of RCCs since they were formed in the 1920s. This could cover not only items produced by the RCCs themselves, but also their allied concerns and organisations: for example, the development of the mobile library network, early rural adult education, support for parish councils and village halls, rural arts and crafts, the relief of the rural poor, and the setting up of Old Peoples Welfare Councils, Citizens Advice Bureaux and the like.